• RSS (Rich Site Summary feeds to allow the establishment of Asynchronous Dissemination of Information services).

Harvesting and OAI

Digital Objects' descriptions may be automatically obtained by using services compliant to the Open Archives Initiative's Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH).

Encoding

When a metadata record is created using the editorial interface, it is stored as an XML-structured, UTF-8 encoded record.

Importing / Exporting Data

The system stores records describing all the characteristics of the physical and digital objects in an internal schema. The system provides all the necessary procedures in order to import into or export from the system data that conform to many different standards and syntaxes i.e. MARC21, MARCXML, Dublin Core etc.

Data entry

The data entry is governed by W3C XML Schema files. These files describe, for each document type managed by the system, the set of legal data elements, their structural relationship, cardinality, and data content. The schema files can, if desired, be used to formally validate metadata files. However, their main purpose is to control the data entry interface, which in turn ensures that data records created within the system are consistent with established cataloging rules, i.e. no invalid records can be created with the data entry interface. Metadata schemas for digital objects are often based on a superset of Dublin Core.

Supported document types

Document types are defined using XML Schemas which are stored in the file system, and which may be maintained either by hand, or using the forms-based schema-editing tool that accompanies the software. Dublin Core Simple and Dublin Core Qualified schemas can be supplied to guide the creation of metadata records of both types, but Keystone is not tied to these or any other particular metadata representations.

Preservation

Except of the Scanning Standards that are used, as well as the supported Preservation metadata, provision is made for the preservation of digital object's master files on different storage systems. Our medium-term plans involve migrating the content to various media types for securing their viability.